Here's today's graphs on pediatric COVID trends in Denton County based on today's numbers released by Denton County Public Health.
The top graph is a seven day rolling average of the number of new pediatric cases each day in the county.
The blue line is the overall trend, cases are doubling roughly every 11-12 days.
In the box below the top graph are some of today's stats:
174 new pediatric COVID cases (positives in patients ages 0-19).
If we were to consider the pediatric population of Denton County as its own community, it would have just over 225,000 people.
Using that number, the case prevalence is 77.1 per 100,000 people.
For the whole county across all ages, it's 48.7 new cases per 100,000 people.
Per 100K people is a standard expression that normalizes for different population sizes and gives a better idea of pandemic burden than absolute new case numbers.
UT Houston School of Public Health considered new daily cases of 25 or more per 100,000 as highly indicative of extensive community transmission of the virus.
The current fully vaccinated fraction of the Denton County population is 52.8%. That's just a little over 477,000 people. The fully vaccinated fraction this week has been increasing by about 0.1% per day.
As of 500pm this afternoon, there were 2 open ICU beds in Denton County and 70 open hospital beds. Critical care and hospitalization resources continue to be under significant strain not just in the DFW area but across Texas and nationwide.
The current test positive rate is 12.6% for the county. Anything over 10% is very worrisome.
Anyplace with a daily positive rate under 5% is in good shape in terms of extent of community spread.
The benchmark is 10%- with a daily positive rate of 10% or less, you are *likely* to catch most of your COVID cases. 10% is not ideal- usually at 5% or less, we can be sure that not only are we catching all the COVID cases but we’re also testing their close contacts.
At a daily positive rate of 10% or higher, extensive community spread is taking place and the pandemic is overwhelming the testing infrastructure. Denton County has been consistently over 10% since July 23rd.
We have been at greater than 25 new daily cases per 100,000 in the county since August 9.
Think about that for a second. BEFORE school even started, the accepted measures we use in medicine to assess the pandemic environment in Denton County were already indicative of unchecked community spread of the Delta variant.
AND THEN THE SCHOOLS OPENED WITHOUT A MASK MANDATE.
"It's still a mystery of me that people reject masking and at least some semblance of distancing in order to carry out what we all agree is very important aspect of kids being in school in person if possible. But there are safe ways to do it and unsafe ways to do it."
-Gregory Poland, MD, Director of Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group